11–20 of 93 posts
programming has changed and leveled up due to ai it's as big as going from zeros and ones to assembly language
In the 01->asm revolution you needed people with roughly the same kind of talent, background and education. Just a different specialization.
Now, writing software is available to people who would have never been able to learn it before.
Well I can't wait until I don't have to hand code at work anymore. I also can't wait until I do something else for work.
Become a manager? retire? I write code in my work, and enjoy it. I also write less directly because of llm's but get to read more (which I luckily also enjoy, as long as I understand what is going on). I think you made more of a snide comment and deep down you actually enjoy it ;-). I mean, who doesn't like to code. It's awesome. If not, i hope you find something fulfilling sooner rather than later.
I hate doing the same at work. I couldn’t care less about my CEO’s product, nor about our linting tips or dependency management rules. My PO can pretend he’s the owner of the company, my engineer colleagues that we are shipping the next google. I couldn’t care less. I do it because I get paid and because it’s my career.
So, it’s not like “you like coding or not”. It has nuances
…when was that?
If someone comes with a pretty decent idea and execution, it doesn’t really matter if code was written by human or llm, does it? Like if the next torvalds ships something great in the open, who cares how was it written.
e.g. Break your code up into loosely coupled modules, don't have leaky abstractions, don't have huge God files, have good black box end-to-end testing, do the design work before the implementation, do lots of automated testing, have good documentation, etc.
Here is another one that was always true, end users only care about the observable behavior of your program. Does it solve the problem in a performant way? Is it reliable?
And another one, it was common when you inherited a large code base that was mature and written before you to not have any clue how most of it worked.
We have to accept that the art of nudging the text around is just not part of producing code for money anymore.
Every other time that programming has gotten easier we got more (often worse) code, though some folks who made their livings exploiting the inefficiencies had to adapt. This will be the same. This isn't the end of programming, it's the beginning of your broccoli haired nephews ability to program. It's also opening a whole new world of opportunity to those with real skill. A world filled with mountains of terrible cod…
Sure, they still exist, but they are priced and marketed towards a specific class of people, and not the mass. And with software it’s even harder as software was never targeted at the mass. Software was always a by product of a car, a tv, or your fridge. No ordinary folk ever said “I’m going to go a buy WinZip now”. They simply had a variant of WinZip available with whatever computer they bought. There is simply no category of people who are willing to pay for “high quality hand crafted software”, except for perhaps a few ideologically motivated people.
Software development “lost” because it was seen as “something that comes for free with a computer”, and not something that people have to actively buy, like they buy TVs, fridges, or paintings.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Become a manager? retire? I write code in my work, and enjoy it. I also write less directly because of llm's but get to read more (which I luckily also enjoy, as long as I understand what is going on). I think you made more of a snide comment and deep down you actually enjoy it ;-). I mean, who doesn't like to code. It's awesome. If not, i hope you find something fulfilling sooner rather than later.
I love to write code and solve problems in personal projects. I love to read interesting technical books. I love to learn certain new technologies. I hate doing the same at work. I couldn’t care less about my CEO’s product, nor about our linting tips or dependency management rules. My PO can pretend he’s the owner of the company, my engineer colleagues that we are shipping the next google. I couldn’t care less. I do…